The Best $20 on the Planet
Hyperbole, yes. The best? Yes, too.
In Philadelphia we’re fortunate to have some of the best food there is.
Arguing about “the best” of anything is pure childhood because it’s hypothetical. But it’s still fun, and good fiction. More reasonable is to declare something “as good as can possibly be.” And that’s where this story is going.
We have some of the greatest restaurants in the world, but don’t tell anyone; that’s the essence of Philadelphia… the Sales Prevention Department (a branch of the Anti-Tourism bureau) is chartered with making sure that the world only knows us from our lowest moments: the Move Fire, smashing Hitchbot to smithereens (stripped, dismembered, and decapitated for extra style points), and throwing snowballs at Santa Claus. But we also teach the masses about cheesesteaks and their ilk. And we have (or have had) two street-food carts that reach the roof of food-dom.
La Dominique, the food cart at 33rd and Market street seems to have gone on to food-cart heaven but Mr. Chojnack ibrought us the greatest crepes money could buy. I always melted upon having his Mexican. So now all we have is Gus.
On this one day, I was killing time walking around the city while waiting to pick up my wife. I strategized to pass Gus’s cart around 11AM, knowing he might not even have parked the stand-inside cart on the sidewalk yet. It’s been on 20th Street a hundred yards south of Market for the last 12 years or so. I knew he doesn’t get the fire going until around 12, but I thought I’d ask if he’d take my money for an advance order, so I could stop by after 12 and not have to wait in line.
I wasn’t simply tempting fate; I knew that nothing on Earth was less likely than Gus bending passion toward convenience (let alone customer service) … and sure enough, after enduring some irrelevant rantings about the profound chasm between bread and food (I’m not kidding… first he said he had no bread, then professed that you don’t need bread if you have genuine food), he of course said the equivalent of: “Are you fucking nuts? Do you think I’m going to take your money, even with an extra $5 tip, to break the sanctity of my followers standing quietly and obediently in line?” He actually said “I forget (sic)”… broken English for “I’ll forget who you are in one hour,” but the message was clear.
So I came back after 12, with my wife in tow, to show her Gus’s act in-person for the first time since I first came home with his chicken, 17 years earlier. There were six people inline ahead of us, reverent, heads bowed, not poking the bear.
<<<to be completed>>>
